Pretty good start of an alternative history trilogy. Aliens attack earth during WW II forcing everyone to stop fighting to defend earth. Many characters to follow in the story. ( )

Gafst upp á þessari. Persónur flatar, sagan og öll umgjörð óspennandi.
Bókin gerist 1942 og segir frá innrás geimvera í miðri heimsstyrjöldinni. Tækni þeirra er þó einungis svipuð tækni manna um 1990 (fyrir utan geimskipin auðvitað) og þær eru alla jafnan vitlausar og útséð að snilli manna muni tryggja þeim sigur í baráttunni við geimverurnar þrátt fyrir betri tækni þeirra. ( )

It starts slow but builds up nicely ( )

A doorstop-sized novel - the first of a series - wherein World War II is rudely interrupted by an alien invasion. Former enemies have to join forces to combat the greater foe. The history is fairly well done, though it's not entirely clear from the internal narrative exactly what year it is, and the passage of time tends to go a little by the board; about three-quarters of the way through the book, the Luftwaffe turns up with jet aircraft, which is a little bit of a surprise because we've been down and dirty with the action most of the time and haven't had time to relate the story back to "our" history. But this is a minor criticism.

The human characters take a little time to get into their stride, but they are well enough drawn. Turtledove's historical background shows, and apart from a couple of minor slips (British characters referring to the season as 'Fall' instead of 'Autumn', and an RAF crewman with the surname Whyte who, for some unknowable reason, has not been nicknamed "Chalkie" by his colleagues) the technical and historical details are reasonably solid. Some of the major viewpoint characters have their preconceptions well and truly challenged; and one plot strand deals with the experience of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and their reaction to the aliens' attack on the Germans; the main Jewish character, a rabbi, only realises almost too late that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is only ever a temporary situation.

The aliens are quite sympathetically written. They are reptilian, and come from a long-established race that has held control over their world for many tens of thousands of years. They have done this by careful forward planning and maintaining strict adherance to protocol and precedence; they have already conquered two other worlds and so consider themselves masters of the universe. Unfortunately for them, their only reconnaissance of Earth was carried out in medieval times, and the shock of finding out that some races progress far more rapidly than they expected is well put over, to the extent that the reader can easily find themselves having some sympathy with the invaders. By the end of this first novel, they have been fighting - and slowly losing - an asymmetrical war and beginning to reach the end of their resources as they never anticipated needing to actually fight to hold the world - and a colonisation fleet is only a few years behind...

I found this novel far less of a slog than its length of some 650 pages suggested, though I do wonder how the story will be sustained over the next three volumes. ( )

This is an interesting book that explores one of the major themes in Science fiction: can the human race co-operate when faced with an alien threat. Turtledove's choice of WWII as a setting is good, and he does seem to have done his research. He does a good job setting out a fine choice of human divisions to be sealed before we can all get the nasty aliens and the books are a fine sustained effort. His constant exposure of the pre-WWII level of anti-Semitism may be jarring to some readers, but it was that bad, honest! So this major series starts well. ( )